Competing Prose Psalters and Their Elizabethan Readers

Abstract

Layouts and paratexts of Elizabethan prose psalters advocate two competing reading methods: reading sequentially according to the church calendar or selecting psalms by occasion. Marked psalters and bibles, however, show that Elizabethan readers often disregarded printed prescription, practicing either method, or both, as they chose. To capitalize on reader independence, printers eventually produced texts that encouraged comparative reading across multiple translations, culminating in the two-text psalter of the 1578 Geneva Bible. This episode in the history of devotional reading demonstrates the tendency of Elizabethans to slip the confessional categories into which their own texts, and later historiography, would place them.

Edified by the Margent: Early Modern Readings of Biblical Marginalia

“…20 Both the wealth 16 Richards and Schurink. For work on manuscript marginalia in Bibles, see Slights, 1992;Sherman, 1999Sherman, , 2008Higman;Molekamp, 2006Molekamp, , 2009Molekamp, , 2013Narveson;Fulton, 2021;Fulton and Specland;Specland;Hoff, 2019. See also Hoff's forthcoming article "Transformative Actions: The Fluidity of Materiality and Meaning in Sixteenth-Century Dutch Bibles," in Readers' Hands, ed. S. Corbellini, W. François, and R. A.…”

“…For more general studies of Bible reading, see Tribble;Collinson, 1995;Green;Cummings;Stallybrass;Sharpe, 2003;Owens;Cambers;Ryrie;Hardie-Forsyth;Fulton, 2017a;Hooks;Kilbride, Kotva, and Ravenscroft. 17 Fulton, 2021;Fulton and Specland;Specland;Hoff, 2019. 18 Molekamp, 2015 For more on Tomson's annotations, see Molekamp, 2015, 49.…”